Curated playlist
20th-century English male writers
- J. R. R. TolkienOn his 21st birthday, Tolkien proposed by letter to a woman who was already engaged.
- Christopher NolanChristopher Nolan has no smartphone and no email address. He hand-delivers his scripts to the actors he wants.
- Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling turned down both a knighthood and the Poet Laureateship. He won the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature.
- Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill escaped a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria by hiding on freight trains. It made him famous.
- Raymond ChandlerRaymond Chandler sold his first story for $180 after losing his oil job at forty-four.
- Thomas HardyThomas Hardy's heart and ashes were buried in two different places. The Abbey got his ashes, Stinsford his heart.
- Ian MacDonaldIan MacDonald, the English music critic, was born Ian MacCormick and wrote under a name that was not quite his own. Behind the pseudonym stood a man who studied at Cambridge, edited for a music weekly, wrote song lyrics, and even played…
- Sacha Baron CohenSacha Baron Cohen spilled flour on Ryan Seacrest at the Oscars. He claimed it was Kim Jong-il's ashes.
- W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died hours after reading his poems aloud in a Vienna hotel.
- Antony BeevorAntony Beevor swapped a troop of tanks for a typewriter. The army officer became a historian of war.
- Stephen HawkingDoctors gave Stephen Hawking two years to live at age 21, but he died at 76.
- Cavan ScottCavan Scott wrote Skylanders novels under the pen name Onk Beakman. The first was The Machine of Doom in 2012.
- David AttenboroughAt 11, David Attenborough sold newts to a university for three pence each.
- Rowan AtkinsonRowan Atkinson played one synthesizer note, over and over, at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. The moment came during a performance of "Chariots of Fire". Atkinson appeared as Mr. Bean, and the single note soon…
- Geoffrey EltonGeoffrey Elton argued that Thomas Cromwell, more than Henry VIII, drove a revolution in English government.
- Ronald CoaseRonald Coase faced twenty skeptical senior economists in 1960 and gradually won them over.
- Jeremy Black (historian)Historian Jeremy Black wrote a book on Sherlock Holmes and another on Poirot in 2022.
- Mark LewisohnA famous joke about Ringo Starr was long credited to John Lennon, but Mark Lewisohn found no record he said it.
- MorrisseySteven Patrick Morrissey, known to the world as Morrissey, once led a tour of Manchester for the Oxford Road Show in 1985. Late in that tour he reached the secondary school he had attended. He described it in harsh terms and closed with a…
- Richard AldingtonRichard Aldington replaced banned words in his war novel with asterisks so readers could see the censoring.
- Eric ChristiansenHistorian Eric Christiansen won his Oxford fellowship with a thesis on modern Spain.
- Correlli BarnettMichael Heseltine gave every Cabinet member a copy of Correlli Barnett's The Lost Victory.
- A. L. RowseA china clay worker's son from Cornwall claimed to name Shakespeare's Dark Lady.
- Alan WattsAlan Watts resigned as an Episcopal priest in August 1950. He later became a leading voice of Zen in America.